@dataDave: Terrible whataboutery. Knives (especially in London for the last 5-10 years) are a problem, but whilst one determined guy with a knife can take out a few people, but he's less lethal than a bloke with firearms and a ****load of ammo.
@QualityChimp: I think we should tone down the violence in games a tad, and I agree that the Sniper Elite killcam (as cool as it is - the first five times) is way OTT and not in keeping with the setting. The old adage, just because we can..., comes to mind.

@Everybody else: why do we assume that we take away all the guns tomorrow? Just ban the creation and sale of new ones. The positive effects of lowered gun ownership may take decades to realise (more mass shootings), but they will eventually happen. Same with uber violent videogames, publishers will soon stop making them if it means they can't be sold and find other ways to entertain us or they will scale down the violence to slightly lower than gratuitous and graphic (hopefully).

Legal guns in circulation will eventually become too expensive, as supply and demand take affect and get priced out of most folks range. This might not work with videogames (we can digitally copy them), but the pace of technology might eventually make today's violent games unpalatable to all but the most ardent: PCE Splatterhouse has a pretty niche audience, right?

The whole gun thing is taking away from the real problems in America imho.

You have a generation of young men with no father figures in their lives, they are also being told it wrong to be boy, young men are falling into depression traps and then getting put on some seriously ****ed up meds to try and help them cope with this, which in reality does the exact opposite and turn them into paranoid wrecks.

Of course guns are part of the problem, but there is a much bigger underlying issue that is being swept under the carpet.

I totally agree with your point in that in the perpetrators the gun violence is a symptom of far greater issues including all the ones you've identified - those absolutely need to be addressed. However, it's a symptom that kills a lot of people (when it comes to those killed, the cause is: the gun violence) and, I guess like a medical thing, you can look for the cause but if the symptom is going to kill your patient you should treat that first. Get assault rifles out of the hands of kids first because it will prevent many deaths and then look at all those other things. Like QC quoted earlier, I probably said it better back in 2012:

Originally Posted by me

But I keep thinking of toddlers, because maybe that's what we're dealing with when considering society as a whole. If a toddler kept stabbing people with a fork, you'd have to look at maybe implementing the naughty step, or reducing their sugar or finding what factors are contributing to their behavior and you could probably improve things.

But the very first step? That's simple - you prevent them getting to the forks.

Now, a study based on data from 2012 to 2014 suggests that, on average, 5,790 children in the United States receive medical treatment in an emergency room each year for a gun-related injury. About 21% of those injuries are unintentional, similar to the third-grader's case.

From 2012 to 2014, on average, 1,297 children died annually from a gun-related injury in the US, according to the study, published in the journal Pediatrics on Monday.

The thing is most of the potential underlying issues that are commonly raised mean close to zip in real terms because they apply to millions upon millions of kids in other countries dealing with the same issues without mowing down others in a blaze of bullets. That line of thinking is too often used to side step the real issue.

It's the same with all this talk about games. Trump doesn't care about them, he's demonstrated he doesn't know anything about them either, it's just a lazy and easy way to look like he's doing something without actually doing anything. Games and their content are already regulated so unless he plans to pass a law instantly imprisoning any parent found to be buying adult rated titles it's all his usual puff and bluster.

Guns are within easy reach of children. It's that simple. As long as they remain freely available the nations culture will remain orientated around them and more will die. It's plain and simple individual selfishness causing these deaths.

Whilst it'll serve the usual ill-informed critics, the video is embarrassing in it's reliance on going to quite old titles (though every year there's no shortage of titles that fit the bill) and misses the irony of how many clips feature... well, guns